Next year all x86_64 patents will expire. From then on everybody can make a IME/PSP/Pluton-free x86_64 chip. This makes RISC V completely obsolete since the x86 ecosystem is obviously much more mature.
> This makes RISC V completely obsolete since the x86 ecosystem is obviously much more mature.
While I'd really love to agree with you, the IPC of a RISC-V chip can annihilate an x86 machine on equivalently advanced manufacturing node. It's performance-per-watt can reach up to 10x efficiency over x86 in the right situations, and pretty much all of the cool stuff we like in x86 can be added as an ISA extension.
If we're headed to a RISC/low-power computing future, RISC-V will be the future people's champion. x86 will be a legacy compatibility mode that we use for games and "retrocomputing", likely.
X86 may be mature but I think the M1 has shown that there is plenty of potential for improvement. I know M1 is ARM instead of RISCV, but there may yet be ways to get better chips.
That said, the hardware we have is really good, it's just the software side that is a complete garbage heap.
Apple Silicon was an interesting move when you look at it from a numbers perspective. The M1 is a really impressive chip, but AMD had competitive x86 hardware that was out on the 7nm node. It benchmarked ~10% slower (the 4800u did, at least), consumed more power (25w max vs 15w max) and ran equally as hot as M1, but it did make me wonder - could AMD have made an M1-class chip if TSMC sold them the 5nm silicon they needed? It's hard to say, and arguably the Zen process wasn't (and still isn't) competitive with Apple's process enhancement.
Still though, AMD seems convinced that x86 can compete against modern RISC ISAs. They aren't far away from proving themselves right, honestly.
